How to Study for the Salesforce Sales Cloud Exam

“How to Study for the Salesforce Sales Cloud Exam” is a blog post I have been wanting to write for about a year now. Yes, its been about a year since I officially took this exam, but do remember it like it was yesterday. This exam is quite different than the Salesforce admin or developer exams which Salesforce offers. As with my previous blog post on “How to Study for the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant Exam“, this blog post will focus on how and what to study for the Salesforce Sales Cloud consultant exam and the fundamentals to pass it. The exam focuses on applying what you already know about Salesforce technically then adding implementation fundamentals to the Salesforce Sales Cloud. Typically (not always) Salesforce implementations are completed by system integrators in the marketplace and this exam is very relevant to the world those resources work in every day.

About the Sales Cloud Consultant Exam

The first element you should know about the exam is its not as technical as the Salesforce admin exam, but does require you know administration basics of Salesforce to include troubleshooting. The exam really focuses on ensuring you know not only about Salesforce, but how to apply business logic and project management to your Salesforce knowledge. For example, several exam questions are related to business requests or issues and you are asked to provide the best answer(s) to solve this business problem. If you have worked within project teams delivering functionality into systems, much of the terminology in this exam will look familiar. Essentially, this exam is designed to take your baseline Salesforce knowledge and apply it to the real world project world. Make sure you review this Salesforce site for the overview on the exam.

The exam itself consists of 60 questions of which you must get at least 41 correct (68%) to pass and receive your certification. This certification in my opinion begins to separate you from your peers who may only have the admin and/or dev certifications. I recently received feedback from a person from Indiana who reads the Merivis Blog and just took the Salesforce Salescloud Consultant exam. He said this exam is very “interconnected” in that one question within the exam can help answer or provide insights into another question. This gentleman from Indiana went on to say the following; “there was a question about call deflection which was basically the answer for another question………the question offers a lot more insights than most people would give it credit for”. As you take the exam itself, I would recommend the some of the strategy techniques I blogged about here. Some of the details will be different (number to get correct ect), but you get the idea of this strategy. Every Salesforce exam I have taken (5 certs so far), I use this strategy and hope you do too.

Sales Cloud Exam Essentials

When considering “How to Study for the Salesforce Sales Cloud Exam”. you should begin with the study guide posted by Salesforce. This study guide will provide you the baseline of what to expect, what to focus on and the overall exam outline. In regards to what you actually should prepare, I would start first with Salesforce Premier training. If you have access to Salesforce Premier training, definitely go through each of the recommended courses the course from the Salesforce study guide. A few courses I would definitely recommend are the following:

Territory Management

Campaign Management (Leads)

Communities overview

Salesforce Files, CRM Content, Knowledge, Documents, and Attachments (here is a great page on the differences)

If you do not have access to take the Salesforce premier training recommended by the study guide, consider the following. Look through the implementation guides mentioned and get the idea of every topic which will be covered on the exam. This is not the best way, but if you do not have access to the premier online training, it’s alot better than nothing.

Next, you should check out the site Quizlet and review specific flash cards. Some of these study guide websites like Quizlet can be tricky (some have wrong information), but of all of them Quizlet is the best at this point. The most important aspect of these type of sites it how the questions are asked, the format and the style. From my analysis here are the sets of flash cards I would recommend studying:

In summary, if you have any kind of project management or business analyst experience, part of this exam will come easier to you. Recently another reader of my blog who just took this exam offered the following insights upon passing it; “I changed my answers to at least two questions because I re-read the question at least 3-4 times and figured out the question was actually pointing in a different direction”. This means you should read each question carefully with purpose and understand the interconnection of how the Salescloud works. Good luck with the exam and let me know if you have any questions.

Hector Perez Jr was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. After joining the US Air Force in 1990, he trained to be a combat medic and served in Operation Desert Storm.
Since graduating from the University of Texas, Hector has two decades of experience driving complex global IT initiatives for an impressive host of large-scale organizations such as Dell, Inc. and continues to work in the Salesforce.com eco-system. In conjunction with his consulting and IT management work, Hector has received extensive CRM accreditation, including certification as a Salesforce.com Administrator, Salesforce.com Developer, and Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant.

Hello Hector. I am consistently following your blog. I passed my admin 201 on 26th June and your blog definitely helped me grasping do and don’t of exams and strategies related to it. My another target milestone is SF cloud consultant. However, study guide says prereq..for the exam is Salesforce admin 201 cert.. Do I need experience as administrator to qualify for the exam? The study guide is somewhat little baffling. It talks about pre-req as SF 201 cert and in description it says that audiences are experienced administrators? Please help. Thanks.

hectorperezjr

Mit, for the Salesforce Cloud Consultant, you really need some hands on experience and should have your ADM 201 cert. Otherwise, you don’t need years of experience, but should practive and know how to be an admin.

Mit

I am looking for a pointer where I can target the specific badges/trails/projects in SFTrailheads that can prepare me for the Sales Cloud Cert. Any suggestion on that?

hectorperezjr

Thank you for following my blog, really appreciate it. I don’t have advice for this one really other than, look at the study guide and try to match to the relevant trailheads. There are other sites if you google the right key words. Check out sfdc99.com as well. Good luck!

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